Plane crash raises concerns

McClatchy Newspapers

Published Thursday, July 19, 2007

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- After nearly 10 months of turmoil in this country's air traffic system, Tuesday night's passenger jet crash claiming at least 189 lives has raised red flags around the world about the ability of Brazilian authorities to secure the country's airways.

Many are asking whether Brazilian government negligence contributed to the accident, in which an Airbus 320 operated by the Brazilian airline TAM skidded off the rain-slicked main runway at the country's busiest airport, Congonhas in the city of Sao Paulo, and crashed into a gas station and cargo terminal.

The air crash, Brazil's deadliest, followed a Sept. 29, 2006, mid-air collision over the Amazon rain forest. That collision killed 154 people and had been the country's deadliest air accident.

The International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Associations, representing more than 50,000 members, warned in a statement Wednesday night that Brazil is in a "very deep" crisis "where air safety cannot be guaranteed anymore as the system is operated at its limits and without the required safety margins."

Brazilian air officials insisted Wednesday that the system was safe and suggested that the jet's pilots had been flying too quickly while landing Tuesday, although they said investigations were just beginning.

The bulk of public attention, however, has focused on conditions at Congonhas, where at least five planes have skidded off the main runway, without producing casualties, during rains since last year, including one the day before Tuesday's crash. Another flight operated by TAM crashed on takeoff from Congonhas in 1996, killing 99 people.

Air officials said they had taken care of the main problem -- flooding on the main runway -- by repaving it. Yet they reopened the runway late last month without installing its sole drainage system, grooves in the asphalt designed to channel off water, said Kriscia Proncia, a spokeswoman for the airport authority Infraero.

Those grooves are scheduled to be installed by September, but the work could be moved up in response to Tuesday's accident, said Armando Schneider Filho, the airport authority's superintendent of engineering, in a tense news conference Wednesday night.

Schneider Filho insisted that initial inquiries suggested flooding on the runway hadn't caused Tuesday's accident, which occurred amid a steady rain. Airport authorities are required to close the runway if more than a tenth of an inch of water accumulates.